Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the anomalous radio signal that led to the identification of pulsars. While inspecting paper recordings from the Cambridge interplanetary scintillation survey, she noticed recurring unusual structure from the same part of the sky and obtained faster recordings that resolved regularly spaced pulses.
Her account distinguishes noticing an anomaly from establishing its origin. The team checked interference, satellite and other explanations, while the source's recurrence in sidereal time tied it to the sky. Finding additional sources made a single accidental terrestrial explanation increasingly implausible.[ref]
Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars? by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. First-person account: chart inspection, fast recordings, sidereal recurrence and subsequent sources
Portrait of Jocelyn Bell Burnell
. Harry the Dirty Dog at English Wikipedia. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Source usage terms, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a renowned astrophysicist from Northern Ireland, best known for her pivotal role in the discovery of pulsars. While working on her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in the 1960s, she and her advisor, Antony Hewish, detected regular radio signals from space, which were later identified as pulsars—rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of radiation.
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